Ce ce que les PETITES ANNONCES racontent de nos idéaux AMOUREUX

Añadido: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]A gentleman, 28 years old, from an excellent family, with a pleasant appearance and a good situation, would like to marry a young lady with a dowry. This is a matrimonial advertisement that appeared in the French hunting magazine in 1896. There is no problem talking about money, clearly expressing a desire to marry to increase one's fortune and not one's family. Another one was written by a woman in the Paris region in July 1930. Miss civil servant, 35 years old, situation 17000, expectation 100000. These advertisements remain relatively marginal, it must be said, but they will gradually become established in newspapers throughout the 20th century.

[00:00:36]Quentin Lipman is a university professor of economics at ExMarseille School of Economics.

[00:00:43]We can find examples of them dating back to the 19th century, or even perhaps before, but they were not very common to my knowledge.

[00:00:52]I would say that there is more, it became more and more common throughout the 20th century with a peak in the 50s and 60s. Before that, you can find them in different newspapers, but they are small sections, there are not many, and it is quite rare in fact to find a newspaper that publishes tons of them apart from Le Chasseur Français and apart from the 50s and 60s. So, there are estimates. In fact, there is uh data from surveys that have been launched on uh how people met their spouse. So, by what means and, uh, these surveys, in fact, they estimate that it's, uh, not much, it's about 1% maximum of unions over the century that were formed by, uh, these classified ads.

[00:01:38]Ultimately, these classified ads resulted in relatively few couples, only 1% of unions, but it still says something about the times they represent. What do these matrimonial advertisements say about the evolution of our desires for union, of our romantic ideals?

[00:01:50]What were we looking for in others long before Tinder? This is what this study, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations, sought to explore.

[00:01:58]And to do this, the two authors of this study read nearly a million matrimonial advertisements.

[00:02:03]Yes, computer geek nonetheless, but yes, a million classified ads reviewed from four countries: France, Canada, the United States and India. For France, it's the French hunter. The period studied extends from 1950, after the war, to 1995. And 1995 is a key date since it marks the beginning of dating sites. The aim of the study is to analyze the lexical registers of these classified ads, to determine the changes in criteria. Do we continue to seek money from others as we did at the beginning of the century, or do desires evolve?

[00:02:35]As a result, in Western countries, economic vocabulary disappeared from the 1970s onwards in favor of criteria related to personality.

[00:02:44]So what we observe in France and Canada is that economic criteria were predominant in the 1950s and early 1960s. And from the late 1960s, early 1970s onwards, economic criteria were less and less emphasized both in the search for a spouse and in self-presentation. And it gradually declined until the 90s where they were in fact a minority and were replaced during this period by personality criteria, what are called personality criteria. So these are words that will refer to, for example, what we call the agreeableness of the spouse or potential spouse. So look for someone who is nice, funny, pleasant, kind, that sort of thing. And this actually gained importance from the 1970s onwards. In France and Canada, women entered the labor market at that time, which could explain the disappearance of economic criteria. And this is very clearly evident in the announcements.

[00:03:55]Listen to this one, published in the 90s this time, still in the French hunter magazine.

[00:04:01]Single, 33-year-old female administrative executive, dynamic, with a pleasant face, would like to meet a sincere, simple, serious, humorous, tender young man who desires family life and children. In the United States, the same evolution is observed towards personality criteria, but another dimension appears. References to African-American ethnic origin are absent from French and Canadian advertisements. In India, however, the trend is quite different.

[00:04:26]Economic criteria remain central in matrimonial advertisements, far more so than personality criteria.

[00:04:32]The two authors of the study link this difference to the low employment rate of women in this country up until the 2000s. Behind these few lines published in newspapers, profound transformations of society ultimately appear in the relationship to money, in the place of women, in the qualities considered important to form a couple. As if long before dating services existed, classified ads allowed one to paint in a few words the portrait of the ideal partner of each era.